Adoption of bioethical standards is a meaningless exercise in a nation whose government has gone mad, a nation where secrecy provides cover for atrocities. In the United States of America, arbitrary power has supplanted due process. Those who really rule here have nothing but contempt for Law, Constitution, and the common concepts of human rights and human dignity.
Devices exist that can read people's thoughts, broadcast "voices" into their personal space, plant ideas in their heads, monitor their dreams, subject them to dreams that are not theirs, and interfere in distressing and degrading ways with their bodily functions and emotions. Such devices are available as torture implements for use by degenerate criminals. These are facts that we all have a "need to know."
The safety of society depends on the rule of law. All persons of good will must demand that the Executive Branch of the United States Government disclose without delay the existence and nature of these electromagnetic anti-personnel weapons, and submit the use of these devices to strict legal regulation and oversight. Chemical and biological weapons, moreover, should be banned outright, as they are in international law.
Once and for all, this nation must establish that no-one is above the law, that nothing supersedes the Bill of Rights, that national security is, first and foremost, the security of the nation's people, and that human rights apply to all individuals, without distinction.
I offer for the consideration of all persons of good will the following manifesto, setting forth self-evident rights whose clear delineation has become a sad necessity.
- Freedom of thought is, and must forever remain, absolute. People may think anything they want, any time or place they wish.
- Thoughts are not actions. One cannot be held responsible for one's thoughts, be they intentional, random, or imposed. There can be no law against thinking, nor does thinking violate any law that exists.
- Thoughts are, and must forever remain, private. No-one may know another's thoughts, probe another's memory, examine another's conscience, or monitor another's dreams, unless the other chooses to share them. This applies as well to all those bodily sensations, emissions, reflexes or functions not ordinarily observable from a public place. They are private and personal. To intrude upon them is to violate the dignity of the human person.
- No-one may impose thoughts, images, sensations, responses, or physiological functions on another individual without that person's express and continuing consent. No-one is entitled to poison anyone else. These are unconscionable assaults upon human dignity and personal integrity.
- Electromagnetic violation of privacy, disruption of mental or somatic integrity, and deprivation of personal autonomy clearly constitute cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment, mounting frequently to the level of torture. The same is true of chemical and biological poisoning. The human rights treaties that embody humanity's highest standards of compassionate justice demand objective investigation of all such violations and the provision of effective remedies and appropriate compensation to those so abused.
- We are human beings, not horses to be ridden, cows to be milked, rats to be run through mazes or lambs to be sacrificed. We are not toys, not tools, not weapons. We are persons, free and equal. We are the people, not a hostile foreign army. We demand -- and all should demand -- full recognition and effective protection of our dignity and our rights, full liberty under law, and the promise of perpetual respect for ourselves and the generations to come.
James Henry Graf
